Beneath the Waves

When the Sun and the Sea have a falling out, it's up to you to dive into the ocean and retrieve the Idols hidden beneath the waves, carrying them all to the mountaintops where they rightfully belong... or so you think. Gregory Weir's latest experimental platformer is short, dreamlike, and surreal, and worth a play despite suffering from some tedious avoidance/platforming sequences.

I don't have any complaints with the controllers. It's a little repetitive, but then it's such a short game! Overall it was intersting and captivating. Such a simple story with such a simple storytelling.. it's a surprise how well it works.

Yeah. My advice on last idol - some sort of button-mash; just the instant when you get the idol start swimming as fast as possible in general direction where you supposed to, and don't think about finesse...
Also,

when/if the kraken takes the idol from you - keep swimming into him and he will drop it the same way as you do.

So in any case, be quick!

Afther the game, on the menu there is an option to "replay from the last idol". Does it imply there is more then one ending?

For some reason, I just don't feel that this story is all to deep like how Weir generally writes his stories. I guess me lacking someone to love, never mind being broken up, would be cause for that.

In a way, the story kind of makes me think about couples whom have undergone divorce, and they fight over who gets what. Even though they don't really want to fight, they have to fight, for no better reason than they must.

Maybe someone else can help shed some light with their ideas. Perhaps it is myself who is seeing this too shallowly.

@keith
You can't really wall jump. It's more like grabbing on to the ledge. So, it's not necessarily that you can't wall jump off of certain walls, it's that you can't wall jump off of certain parts of the wall.

Dear gods, "dolphin in rubberbands" is a very fitting description of the controls. I had to give up just trying to get the second idol - the wildly flailing controls that make precision-swims near impossible, the graphics that blend together and make it almost impossible to tell background from foreground...

It is a very strange contradiction to what Weir usually presents us to, sadly.

I'll be honest, I didn't find the controls as bad as some of you are describing them. Sure, I had more than one experience accidentally hurtling off a cliff or a ledge, but other than that, it was mostly maneuverable.

Yes,

The Kraken did steal my idol several times, but it's very easy to make it drop the idol again, and then of course once I had it, I could blast away like the little rocketship that I really am.

Perhaps we moved too quickly underwater, which made turning difficult?

The lack of atmosphere jarred me more so than the controls - the land, entirely made of blocks, seemed harsh and unfinished, and the tasks of retrieving each idol became more and more tedious. The last couple of steps before the final idol were a bit unexpected, and I thought it would escalate into something better, but even this one was extremely easy to overcome.

Considering this is a story about the sun and the ocean, I had hoped there would be more of the sun as a character, and I'm slightly disappointed that there wasn't. I feel like there could have been more, and much better, and am left feeling a little disappointed knowing Weir's previous works.

I had little to no problems controlling the little blur underwater, and I had no problems at all controlling him above ground.

And while I was never fully threatened by the Sharks or the Kraken in the way that Weir's joke title "Oh S*** Sharks" would imply, I found that the controls, imprecise as they were, added to the sense of danger.

I was glad that the open spaces were as expansive as they were, and that the caverns were not as restricting as they could have been.

It's a definite departure from his other games, and interesting to play - not that the mechanics were particularly different from any other existing game, but the dynamics were interesting to explore.

One thing I found with the swimming speed, the precarious feel of the above-water platforms and the sheer size of the world was that I didn't feel compelled to explore every single corner of the world, as long as I was finding my idols and getting them to where they needed to go. For a compulsive explorer, that feeling that I didn't need to go everywhere and see everything was an interesting change.

I find it kind of strange that people seem to be having so much difficulty with

the Kraken. I had zero issues on my first attempt. I figured he/she/it was going to chase me, so I just snatched it and swam like hell... admittedly a lot of it was probably luck in that I narrowly avoided a bunch of obstacles and picked up a ridiculous amount of speed so that even when I DID drop the Idol at one point due to an overabundance of sharks, I was able to grab it and get out of the water easily. Kraken never even caught up with me.

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